Friday, April 6, 2012

Here’s How Evolutionists Hypocritically Criticize Others

The planets do not revolve about the Earth. Nor do the Sun or the stars. But if that is your model, you can force-fit the observations to it. In the case of geocentrism, dozens of bizarre adjustments were required to fit the observations. As the figure illustrates, these adjustments added a great deal more complication to the basic geocentric model. With the adjustments, the planets were not exactly rotating about Earth, but about some nearby point (which could be adjusted as needed). Furthermore, as the planets circle around the Earth or a nearby point, they also travel in smaller circles, or epicycles. And of course these epicycles can be adjusted as needed. The result is a complicated model of celestial motion with a large number of knobs which are adjusted to try to match what we observe from Earth. And it works. If your model has sufficient number of knobs, you can fit any data.

This is what evolutionists do as well. The species do not fit into an evolutionary tree of life. The fossil record does not reveal this, the anatomy of the species does not reveal this, their embryonic development patterns do not reveal this, nor does the DNA reveal this.

So evolutionists add a great number of evolutionary “epicycles” to their model. Genes are transferred between species as needed, identical designs independently evolve—like lightning striking twice—over and over, unique designs rapidly evolve over and over, and so forth. These are the evolutionist’s just-so stories of the many bizarre, unobservable ways that they imagine evolution to have occurred in order to fit the data. And evolutionists insist all of this is true. It is not merely a theory, it is a fact beyond any reasonable doubt, they resolutely maintain.

And so all of these epicycles do not bother the evolutionist. One evolution professor, after admitting that the evolutionary tree requires a vast number of gene transfer events for many species, nonetheless insisted that it would be perverse to suggest that the evolutionary tree does not work for animals:

To be sure, much of evolution has been tree-like and is captured in hierarchical classifications. Although plant speciation is often effected by reticulation and radical primary and secondary symbioses lie at the base of the eukaryotes and several groups within them, it would be perverse to claim that Darwin’s TOL [tree of life] hypothesis has been falsified for animals (the taxon to which he primarily addressed himself) or that it is not an appropriate model for many taxa at many levels of analysis.

Perverse? Readers unfamiliar with the evolution genre may find that to be a curious choice of words. But in fact such sentiment, and this specific word, is not at all unusual in evolutionary thought. This is striking because “perverse” is a rather strong word that suggests more than merely a scientific mistake or misjudgment. It suggests mal intent perhaps driven by ulterior motive.

Evolutionists are so certain that the world arose spontaneously, all by itself, that anyone who even has the slightest doubt is viewed as harboring some irrational, deliberate opposition to the truth.

Are you getting the picture? Evolutionists hold to a religiously-driven creation story that is continually refuted by science. They dogmatically insist it is not merely a theory, but is a fact. And with self-righteous indignation they smear anyone who even so much as expresses doubt about theory dogma. It isn’t a pretty picture.

In this case, there are all kinds of scientific problems with the professor’s insistence that animals fit evolution’s tree of life model. Over and over the same designs are found in distant animals, in very different environments. At the other end of the spectrum, completely unique designs are found in animals that otherwise are highly similar. Likewise the embryonic development patterns reveal such unique differences in otherwise similar species. And the fossil record looks more like an inverted evolutionary tree, with bursts of diversity appearing followed by a reduction of diversity via extinction.

Now there are no easy answers to the question of origins. I’m not going to tell you I have the truth of why the fossil record, the embryonic patterns, the anatomical comparisons, and so forth, look the way they do. And when someone says they do, then run. For those who say it is all obvious, and smear those who disagree, have cards they’re not showing.

Evolution’s hole card is religion. It always comes out when the going gets rough. There are all kinds of proofs for why evolution is a known fact, and every single one of them is religious. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it is subtle. But it always is religious. That shouldn’t be too surprising since you certainly can’t use science to prove such an incredible claim.

Historically and today, evolution is underwritten by deep metaphysical truth claims. Then evolutionists turn around and claim it is all about science. And anyone who disagrees is perverse. It isn’t a pretty picture.

31 comments:

Nice article. Evolution is much worse than epicycles, though, because the Darwinian epicycles just don't work. Accidental lateral gene transfer is obviously BS. How did the super complex echolocation genes of bats get transferred to dolphins? Bats and dolphins hopped onto separate branches of the TOL many millions of years before either species gained echolocation.

Conclusion: All evolutionists are either liars, cretins, or jerks. Or, more probably, all of the above. Every single one of them. LOL.

Sorry, what percent of biologists are evolutionists? Surely a majority,right? Figured since we were dealing in generalities that 51% means 100%. If they are not scary in some way,why the need to vilify them? Because they are stupid? Do you vilify people because they are stupid? That is old school.

Even if 99% of biologists are evolutionists, biologists must not be bunched in with evolutionists. This is true, especially since biologists are forcibly brainwashed into accepting the evolutionist doctrine from the day they began their study and even before that through mass media propaganda. It takes a lot of deep and courageous thinking for a person to counter years of relentless indoctrination and massive intimidation by one's peers.

The truth of design and creation is too important to humanity to allow a bunch of self-deluded morons and hypocrites (jackasses) to completely obliterate it from the public's collective understanding. Evolutionists are a scary bunch because they oppose the truth and, as such, they should be debunked and publicly ridiculed. This will happen in your lifetime. Mark my words. Not everybody is fooled.

It is interesting that you take a nuanced view of biologists. I agree it is foolish to ascribe to a group some Borg- like collective thought.So ,in your mind, most biologists mindless conformists. With nothing to support their dogma except misinterpreted empirical studies.Only a few thru superior intelligence or fortitude escape this prison of propoganda. How did you escape this trap? I assume that you have spent a great deal of time studying the evolutionist's research and reasoning, it is always wise to understand your opponents position in order to debunk accurately,expose their lies,etc. What allowed you to escape the indoctrination that 95% of biologists fall prey ?

There is nothing wrong with a tree of life hypothesis since this is observed. The problem is with the nested tree of life nonsense that was preached as the gospel truth by evolutionists for close to a century. Now that the nested TOL has been soundly and humiliatingly falsified, evolutionists are talking about complex lateral gene transfers and convergence between distantly related species as if it were a plausible alternative. It's not. It's BS on the face of it. Evolution's most important prediction is now falsified. Live with it.

CH's anti-science propaganda gets a little more stupid and over-the-top every time he posts.

There hasn't been any scientific discussion on this blog in years. It's one dumb Creationist lie after another, followed by scientifically illiterate IDCers like Batspit77 and Louis the fruit loop slobbering their approval and preaching Bible verses.

The only value is for entertainment purposes, to see how deeply they can stick their feet into their collective mouth. Oh well, if it makes them happy to stay so scientifically ignorant, so be it.

Just the usual incompetent hackery on display here. What Hunter isn't telling you is that the treeishness of a dataset can be measured, and the degree of difference between trees can be measured. When this is done on multicellular organisms, we get a really shockingly high amount of congruence between datasets. The occasional reported incongruence doesn't change this, even though sometimes scientists get quite excited about specific examples. "Incongruence" is not an all-or-nothing thing. When one branch disagrees between two trees, and all of the other branches agree, this is a very high amount of statistical agreement. Arguing that this kind of disagreement falsifies common ancestry is like arguing that the difference between estimating the age of the Earth at 4.5 billion years vs. 4.6 billion years falsifies the age of the Earth, because "100 million years is such a huge difference."

When you get to single-celled organisms, which are eating each other and which don't have isolated germlines, and which are known in some cases to eat DNA floating around in the environment, and thus have a higher chance of lateral gene transfer, you actually *still* have an awful lot of tree signal. This is why, for example, people who do environmental genomics can take a scoop of soil or seafloor mud, sequence everything in the sample, and then sort the genes into any one of 20-some prokaryote phyla. It's not quite perfect in all cases (the most shocking one is LGT between some hyperthermophiles between archaea and bacteria in hot springs), but it's pretty damn good.

Scientific explanation: DNA is mostly inherited vertically, as can be observed in the wild and in the lab in any organism you care to look at, but rarely is laterally transferred, as also can be (rarely) observed.

Cornelius Hunter's actual explanation: invoke a near-infinite number of free parameters (i.e. epicycles) in the form of "God did it through magic, any sequence pattern we observe is the way it is because it was God's good pleasure to do it that way, any human questioning of this explanation is impertinent and is metaphysical religion masquerading as science."

Wow. If a set of identical genes appears in two distant species millions of years after the two were separated, it is proof that the nested tree of life is a pile of crap. It has nothing to do with statistics. Get a clue and stop being a liar and a jerk. LOL.

This was a great article! I agree that virtually all strident Darwinists are highly motivated by unprovable metaphysical presuppositions. This is why they react in such a highly emotional way when their views are challenged.

This was a great article! I agree that virtually all strident Darwinists are highly motivated by unprovable metaphysical presuppositions. This is why they react in such a highly emotional way when their views are challenged."

That, or the people challenging them haven't bothered to learn the basics of the field they are criticizing, and are instead mostly just misrepresenting scientists, and mindlessly repeating stuff they heard from creationists, who also can't be bothered to learn the basics.

Nick can you please tell me how the 'local', within space and time, material processes of Neo-Darwinism can explain 'non-local', beyond space and time, quantum entanglement/information in life on a massive scale?

Falsification Of Neo-Darwinism by Quantum Entanglement/Informationhttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8AQgqFqiRQwyaF8t1_CKTPQ9duN8FHU9-pV4oBDOVs/edit?hl=en_US

Nick can you please tell me how the 'local', within space and time, material processes of Neo-Darwinism can explain 'non-local', beyond space and time, quantum entanglement/information in life on a massive scale?

First, for the umpteenth time, evolution is a theory in biology not physics. It makes no claims about quantum phenomena.

Second, counterintuitive as they are to those of us brought up in a world described by classical physics, quantum phenomena are still arguably an aspect of material reality, not some strange 'other' realm "beyond time and space".

Third, glancing through your store of carefully-mined quotes it is clear that natural quantum entanglement is a fragile and short-lived state. Physicists working on quantum computing have to work very hard to shield their sub-atomic devices from all the external influences that could cause unwanted decoherence.

Fourth, although quantum phenomena have been observed at the molecular level that is still a long way from showing that they control the macroscopic world in which we live. Physicists may routinely observe spin reversals in entangled particle pairs but you won't see two billiards balls behaving in the same way, no matter how close together you push them or how carefully you watch them

Fifth, it's not even clear that you need to invoke information to explain the "spooky action at a distance" of entanglement. Might it not be better to think of two particles, once entangled, as a single merged entity extended in space and time wit no information passing between the different parts?

Sixth, just which version of information is being passed around at the quantum level? Is it the same as the information that informationists claim is being shuffked around in living things? Is it the same as the information as we are all exchanging here. Or is all this loose talk about information just a whole load of equivocation?

Ian, since you are clearly grasping in the dark for straws, let's cut to the chase, you have to falsify quantum non-locality in order to overturn this falsification of the reductive materialistic foundation of neo-Darwinism. It is as simple as that!

What Nick means by "people challenging them haven't bothered to learn the basics of the field they are criticizing" is that in order to question the science of evolutionary theory you must accept it, as long as you don't deny it though. As soon as you deny it, you probably forgot your basics and should think about relearning them.

Well Ian, all you have to do to save your nihilistic atheism, as if it were worth saving, is to propose a beyond space and time cause to account for the non-local quantum information we find in life on a massive scale.

Acts 17: 22-28Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.'

If you're talking about our penchant for spilling blood then we are certainly the offspring of the Old Testament God. Somebody compiled this little list of those killed by God and His Chosen People in the OT

The entire population of the earth except for eight survivors (Genesis 7:23). Every inhabitant of Sodom and Gomorrah except for one family (Genesis 19:24). Every first born of Egypt (Exodus 12:29). All the hosts of the Pharaoh, including the captains of 600 chariots (Exodus 14:27,28). Amalek and his people (Exodus 17:11,16). 3,000 Israelites (Exodus 32:27). 250 Levite princes who had challenged the leadership of Moses (Numbers 16:1-40). 14,700 Jews in a plague who had rebelled against Moses following the killing of the princes (Numbers 16:41-49). All the subjects of Og (Numbers 21:34, 35). 24,000 Israelites who lived with Moabite women (Numbers 25:4, 9). All the males, kings, and non-virgin females of the Midianites. (Numbers 31:7, 8). The Ammonites (Deuteronomy 2:19-21). The Horims (Deuteronomy 2:22). All the citizens of Jericho, except for a prostitute and her family (Joshua 6). 12,000 citizens of Ai. Joshua hung the king on a tree. (Joshua 8:1-30). All the people of Makkedah (Joshua 10:28). All the people of Libnah (Joshua 10:29, 30). All the people of Gezer (Joshua 10:33). All the people of Lachish (Joshua 10:32). All the people of Eglon (Joshua 10:34, 35). All the people of Hebron (Joshua 10:36, 37). All the inhabitants of the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs and all their kings (Joshua 10:40). All 31 kings and inhabitants of their countries, and the south country, and the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same from Mt. Halak to Mt. Hermon (Joshua 11:12, 16, 17, 12:24). 10,000 Moabites (Judges 3:29). 10,000 Perizzites and Canaanites (Judges 1:4). 600 Phillistines (Judges 3:31). All of Sisera (Judges 4:16). 120,000 Midianites (Judges 8:10). 25,100 Benjaminites (Judges 20:35). 50,070 people of Bethshemesh (I Samuel 6:19). All the Amalekites (I Samuel 15:3, 7). The armies and five kings of the Amorites (Amos 3:2). The Moabites and 22,000 Syrians (II Samuel 8:2, 5, 6, 14). 40,000 Syrian horsemen (II Samuel 10:18). 100,000 Syrian footmen, followed by 27,000 who were crushed by a wall (I Kings 20:28, 29, 30). 42 children eaten by bears (II Kings 2:23, 24). 185,000 Assyrians killed by an angel (II Kings 19:35). 10,000 Edomites, followed by 10,000 more whose killers brought them to the top of the rock, and cast them down from the top of the rock, that they were broken in pieces. (II Chronicles 28). 120,000 Judeans (II Chronicles 28). 75,000 Persians (Esther 9:16).

Adding up the casualty totals where numbers are given apparently comes to a little over 2.4 million. Including guesstimates for where no figures are given, such as the numbers drowned in the Great Flood or annihilated in Sodom and Gomorrah, could get you up to 25 million. And remember, in those days they didn't mess around. If they put a city to the sword, they killed every living thing in it - men, women, children, babies - everything.

Now, I'm pretty sure this is not the nature of the God in whom you believe but He is still the God of the Old Testament. Unless you're prepared to repudiate that part of the Bible you need to explain to me why I or anyone else should bow down and worship such a bloodthirsty monster.

We create knowledge by conjecture and refutation. Specifically, we create theories using conjecture, then test them using observations, which represents a form of criticism.

So, when criticizing the Bible, we take it seriously, as if it's claims were true in reality, and that all observations should conform to it.

However, this doesn't mean that we personally believe the Bible is true, but if assume it's true for the sake of testing it's clams via observations.

For example, when criticizing the Bible, it wouldn't make sense to assume that Hinduism is true, in reality, then test the claims of the Bible assuming it should conform to all explanations for observations based on Hinduism, would it?

In other words, it's unclear what other means we could use do criticize Christianity or the Bible other than taking it's own claims seriously, rather than some other claims, such as Hinduism, etc.

In fact, any other attempt at criticism would be, well, irrational, wouldn't it?

Let's see now. You're an atheist who does not believe in God and who believes the Bible is all lies and myth and yet you're using the Bible to attack the righteousness of God? Wow.

I'm taking the Bible at its word. If you're saying that none of that really happened, that it's all metaphor and allegory, then that's fine.

If you're saying it's factually correct and historically accurate and are defending it as such then all I can say is you have a very odd notion of righteousness.As Cornelius says, religion drives science, and it matters. LOL.

And, as I say, religion drives science from the classroom and that really does matter.

Actually Ian, the death rate from sin is 100% for human beings! So you should up your total a lot more than 25 million and get really angry at God. :)

Hebrews 2:14-15"Since we, God's children, are human beings - made of flesh and blood - He became flesh and blood too by being born in human form; for only as a human being could He die and in dying break the power of the devil who had the power of death. Only in that way could He deliver those who through fear of death have been living all their lives as slaves to constant dread."

Cornelius G. Hunter is a graduate of the University of Illinois where
he earned a Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology. He is
Adjunct Professor at Biola University and author of the award-winning Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. Hunter’s other books include Darwin’s Proof, and his newest book Science’s Blind Spot
(Baker/Brazos Press). Dr. Hunter's interest in the theory of evolution
involves the historical and theological, as well as scientific, aspects
of the theory. His website is http://www.darwins-god.blogspot.com/